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Reading, Writing And History
“Speculators in Theories“: Henry and Brooks Adams Current Books in Brief A Check List of New Books
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“speculators In Theories”: Henry And Brooks Adams
Like the Mississippi, the flood of books on the Adams family rolls on; and indeed its crest, now that the long-barred portals to the family papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society have been unlocked, still lies ahead of us. How assuredly it was the most articulate as well as the greatest family in American history! Conscious of the role they played, inveterate diary-keepers and letter-...
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Current Books In Brief
Cities in the Wilderness: 1625-1742 (500 pp. $6.95) and Cities in Revolt: 1743-1776 (480 pp. $7.50), by Carl Bridenbaugh. Alfred A. Knopf. Most people know that when the Revolution began, Philadelphia was the second city in the British Empire. America in 1775 had five cities of more than 10,000 people: Boston, New York, Newport, and Charlestown completing the list. In Cities in the...
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“To The Farthest Port Of The Rich East”
In July, 1805, Captain George Crowninshield and his sons waited impatiently for their ship America , under comand of a cousin, Benjamin Crowninshield, to arrive from Sumatra. Their impatience was not joyful since the market at that moment was glutted with pepper and the America ’s cargo would only depress the price even more. They had no one to blame except themselves for the expected cargo...
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Of Barns And Bridges
The first American was, above anything else, a worker in wood. Wood was his only raw material of any consequence, but it was extremely abundant, and the early American knew how to use the ax and the adz, the whipsaw and the drawknife. So he set to work to build the structures that he needed in his daily life—houses, barns, fences, sheds, bridges and whatnot—and in the process of doing it he...
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Current Books In Brief
The Lowering Clouds: the Secret Diary of Harold Ickes . Simon and Schuster. 695 pp. This third volume of the seemingly interminable Ickes diary makes clear a couple of things which were dimly visible earlier—that Ickes had a high opinion of his own capacities, and that one of his dominant motivations was an insatiable desire for power. The man was an extremely able administrator and a...
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A Note About The Peabody Museum
The East India Marine society, organized in Salem in 1799, was made up of shipmasters and super-cargoes (owner’s representatives) who “shall have actually navigated the Seas near the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.” The Society, which had 403 members before the last India captain died, had three purposes. One was to help the needy families of mariners engaged in a hazardous enterprise....
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News Of History
Restoration of an early Nineteenth Century industrial area along the Brandywine Creek has recently been undertaken by the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation of Wilmington, Delaware. On a 168-acre tract where Eleuthère Irénée du Pont founded the Du Pont powder works in 1802, the Foundation is now establishing an industrial museum which will portray the extensive milling operations of flour,...
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Seeing And Hearing History
Early America Reaching back into the early period of American history, recent audio-visual aids supply realistic impressions of those distant years. Library and museum items constitute the chief materials in the 35mm. filmstrip, The Age of Exploration (Museum Extension Service, 10 East 43rd Street, N.Y. 17). Pictures, portraits, maps and prints reveal the widening of geographical...
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The Ancient Game Of Tongue-twisters
During the last century and the early part of the present one, elocution books, designed to “per fect the principles of per fect pronunciation,” enshrined in their pages such gems as: I said “a knap-sack strap,” not “a knap-sack’s strap”; His exclamation was, “Chaste stars!” not “Chase tars!”; The old cold scold sold a school coal-scuttle; Bring me some ice, not some mice; and, Did you say a...
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Chateau Builder To Fifth Avenue
George Washington Vanderbilt II inherited scarcely more than a fraction of his father’s estate. When the railroad magnate, William H. Vanderbilt, dropped dead of an apoplectic fit in his library at 640 Fifth Avenue late in the afternoon of November 28, 1885, he left a fortune the size of which astonished even those who knew him well. It was double the value of the $90,000,000 that he had...
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People Of The Long House
The Six Nations, or Iroquois, have been praised and abused more than any other Indians in North America. Cadwallader Colden praised them for their manly virtues: their courage, patriotism, and love of liberty. Conrad Weiser praised them for their honesty and democratic simplicity. Both men admired them for their statesmanship. The English colonies valued them highly as allies. There might be no...
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James Gordon Bennett — Beneficent Rascal
A young man bearing a parcel called at the New York Herald office one day in 1854, and insisted that he must deliver it to the proprietor, James Gordon Bennett himself. Having passed muster in an anteroom (a procedure made advisable by a bomb Bennett had received in an innocent looking package not long before), the messenger was escorted into the presence of a lean, gnarled man, a bit...
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The Cult Of The Primitives
There is one statement about old American art which most educated Americans, whatever their further ignorance of the subject, cherish. At this very instant, many voices are undoubtedly imparting to unwilling ears—ears unwilling because their owners had intended to tell the same anecdote—that the itinerant portraitists called “primitives” carried around stocks of pre-painted bodies, which they...
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An Eyewitness Describes The Hanging Of John Brown
John Brown of Osawatomie, the guerrilla captain of Bleeding Kansas and leader of the abortive raid on Harpers Ferry to free the slaves, was hanged on the bright balmy morning of December 2, 1859. The scene of the execution of the old abolition raider was at Charlestown, then in Virginia, but soon to become Charlestown, West Virginia, through the agency of a war which Brown’s Harpers Ferry foray...
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Riding The Circuit With Lincoln
One of the most important periods in the life of Abraham Lincoln was the time when he “rode the circuit” in central Illinois in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s. Prairie lawyers and court officials traveled together from one county seat to another for sessions of the circuit court, moving by atrocious frontier roads and stopping in inns, taverns and boarding houses where accommodation was not...
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Yankee Gunners At Louisbourg
Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skillful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any? But some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.Benjamin Franklin : A letter to his brother in Boston...
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How New York Greeted King Ludwig’s Girl Friend
Near the end of 1851, New York was waiting rather breathlessly to see Lola Montez, and although the town was very eager it was not at all sure just what it was going to see. Technically, Lola Montez was a dancer who had been cutting a very wide swath in Europe. It may be that she was not a very good dancer—opinions seemed to differ—but in one way or another she was clearly quite a person....
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A Nosegay Of Valentines
There never was a time for valentines like the Nineteenth Century, those proper old days when love peeped out through clouds of lace and sentiment and not an analyst had appeared to tell us why we felt that way. On these pages is a little remembrance of that perfumed era when a valentine was prepared with pain and opened with blushes.As far as we know, the original St. Valentine himself never so...
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Aide To Four Presidents
One day in 1926 when the world was quiet and no wars were in progress anywhere, Wilson Brown, a spare, erect and self-effacing captain in the Navy, reported to Washington, confidently expecting to pick up orders for his next job, as naval attaché in Paris. Instead, and without explanation, he was hustled over to the White House and subjected to a brief interview with Calvin Coolidge, President of...
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Reading, Writing And History
“New Skies and New Stars” Fantastic Tragedy The Story of the Piano Of Barns and Bridges Current Books in Brief
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“New Skies And New Stars”
No American ever stands very far from the sea. Back of every one of us there is a long ocean voyage. Except for full-blooded Indians, all of us came here by ship. No matter how far inland we may go or how long we may live there, we carry with us a racial memory of the wonder and peril of the empty sea—the feeling that all certitude has been left behind, and that what lies ahead is incredible...
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Fantastic Tragedy
The essence of an historic tragedy is that although we can see it coming we know that nothing can possibly be done to avert it. It is the result of a whole chain of events, and the chain can be extremely loose; it could be broken anywhere—by sheer accident, by the action of someone possessing just a little foresight, by any one of a dozen things which could so easily happen but somehow do not...
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The Story Of The Piano
What is history, anyway—a sober recital of names and dates, with weighty analyses of economic forces and political trends woven in, or a simple attempt to introduce the past to the present in understandable human terms? The answer, probably, is that it is both; but it must be remarked that the professionals have left the second field wide open and that the amateurs occasionally come in and...
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News Of History
After having been in storage for nearly a century, an important and invaluable collection of furniture, paintings, silver, jewelry, and over 85,000 manuscripts of the Livingston family has been acquired by the New-York Historical Society. Included are the personal papers of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, who, as Jefferson’s minister to France, 1801-04, negotiated the Louisiana Purchase and,...
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Seeing And Hearing History
Musical Americana Songs and ballads closely connected with American history bring the past to life on recent long-playing recordings. Three new releases from Folkways (117 West 46th Street, N.Y. 36) continue the series of historic music started with Ballads of the American Revolution . Military and political events between 1791 and 1836 are harmonized in the collection, War of 1812 (...
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Are There Too Many New Deal Diaries?
A few years ago Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon to commemorate an unsung hero: a gardener at Hyde Park who had firmly resisted the temptation to write his memoirs of President Roosevelt. Undoubtedly Mauldin’s gardener was indeed a hero to a reading public wearied and bewildered by the apparently endless outpouring of memoirs and diaries about Roosevelt and the New Deal. In the ten years since...
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Big Guns For Washington
Knox was one of those providential characters which spring up in emergencies, as if they were formed by and for the occasion. —Washington Irving, Life of George Washington. By the time Washington took command of the American Army at Cambridge in July, 1775, his troops had dug fortifications on the hilltops ringing Boston. The British, who had occupied the city for over a year, were pinned down...
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Was America Discovered Before Columbus?
The last issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE reported the publication in Europe of an ancient map giving evidence that the Western Hemisphere was discovered by Portuguese explorers before Columbus. This map, whose history and meaning are discussed in the following article, is here reproduced in color for the first time in the United States. Every American schoolboy knows that Christopher Columbus...
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The Way To The Big Sea Water
The country club at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, looks across the great bend of the St. Mary’s River to Sugar Island, where a few Chippewas still live in the maple forest; beyond are the great spruce woods of Canada and the long dark skyline of the Laurentians. Inside the club house you can see a century-old canoe, a canot du nord built for the wilderness, sturdy and graceful, strong enough to...
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The Letter That Bought An Empire
AMERICAN HERITAGE herewith publishes one of the most .significant letters in American history—the letter which led to the great Louisiana Purchase. It was written to Secretary of State ,James Madison, in the spring of 1803, by Robert R. Livingston, the American minister to France; of it came the vast continental expansion.When Spain transferred Louisiana to France in 1801, the United States took...
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Sidewheeler For Shelburne
In the gray of In late December, 1954, a traveler happening along Thompson’s Road, which skirts Shelburne Bay on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, could have seen a steamboat suspended as if by sky hooks on a horizon of dry land. He might have dismissed this as a mirage or a fantasy, but as it happened there was a steamboat hanging on a horizon of dry land. It was the 892-ton Ticonderoga ,...
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General Lee’s Unsolved Problem
Long after the Civil War was over, with contemplative years for perspective, Jefferson Davis wrote that Robert E. Lee always commanded subject to his orders. The former Confederate president made quite a point of this overlordship, and held to the concept of Davis, the leader, manipulating armies and generals and the destinies of a people. Of course, Davis was right. As he made of the...
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Eli Whitney: Nemesis Of The South
Any American who ruminates about the origins of the Civil War—and that should mean not only professional historians but everyone in the United States, north and south, who has ever been spellbound by the story of his country—will find himself confronted sooner or later by an ingenious contraption for removing seeds from the cotton boll, known as the cotton gin.This device, invented by Eli Whitney...
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The Peales
The aide-de-camp strode into the painting room and handed a message to General Washington, who was sitting for his portrait, a miniature for Mrs. Washington. “Ah,” he remarked alter a mere glance, “Burgoyne is defeated.” And then, supremely honoring his young friend the artist, that imperturbable man put aside the dispatch for later study and resumed the pose.Like Burgoyne, Washington was in good...
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Genealogy Of Peales
Charles Willson Peale taught all his family to paint—brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, even a few promising in-laws—so that two generations of Peales busily recorded themselves and each other in portraits and miniatures. Finally, one of his descendants through his daughter Sophonisba, Charles Coleman Sellers, having sorted out all the family papers, has written a...
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The Great Love in the Life of Emily Dickinson
For many years one of the most fascinating mysteries of American literature has been the personal Iife of Emily Dickinson. Of no other major American poet lias there been so little positive information. Thus far, indeed, there has not even been a wholly reliable text of her works, and the question of the great love-interest of her life and its connection with her poems lias remained a romantic...
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The Last War Cruise Of Old Ironsides
Several years ago the Indiana University family voted to collect fines from professors who parked overtime on the campus. The money raised was turned over to the University library to buy additions to its special collections. Among the first purchases made, for the University’s War of 1812 Collection, was the manuscript journal which served as the basis for the story which is printed here.Mr. A....
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“To Open The Door”
The year 1955 marks the centennial of one of the greatest landmarks in our American heritage of education for all the people. A century ago, the Michigan State College and the Pennsylvania State University were founded as the first of a group of uniquely new and evolutionary institutions of higher learning. These twin birthdays have been recognized by the issuance of a special commemorative U.S....
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The Man Who Gave Away Rockefeller’s Millions
FREDERICK T. GATES and JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER THE MEMOIRS OF Frederick T. Gates A postscript by Allan Nevins Frederick Taylor Gates was a Baptist minister when John D. Rockefeller in 1891 assigned him the job of giving away the world’s greatest fortune. For over twenty years he was one of Rockefeller’s closest associates, in business as well as philanthropy, and the architect of the Rockefeller...
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Frederick T. Gates And John D. Rockefeller
Although few general histories of the United States contain the name of Frederick T. Gates (1853-1929), he had a larger influence on American life than many a general or political leader who receives detailed notice. It is an ironic fact that whenever the name of this wise, careful, idealistic planner is mentioned, someone is sure to say, “Oh, you mean ‘Beta-Million’ Gates?"—a man antipodal in...
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The Memoirs Of Frederick T. Gates
My intimate, confidential relationships with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in New York City began in September, 1891.In connection with the founding of the University of Chicago I had become well acquainted with Mr. Rockefeller. In March of 1891, he told me that the pressure of appeals for philanthropic causes on his time and strength had become too great to be borne; that he was unable to give away...
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A Postscript By Allan Nevins
As this is a selection from a much longer autobiography, still in manuscript, a word remains to be said about some of Frederick T. Gates’s associates. He never faltered in his devotion to John D. Rockefeller, whose gifts complemented his own. Gates was emotional, oratorical, impetuous, and (as he himself wrote) “withal exacting and irritable.” Rockefeller was unemotional, highly reserved,...
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The Greatest Balloon Voyage Ever Made
John Wise, known during his lifetime as the Father of American Ballooning, was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1808. He made many contributions to American airmanship and to the literature of aerostatics in a career which extended over forty years and included 446 free balloon ascensions. Unlike most of the American aeronauts of his day who used the great globes for entertainment at fairs and...
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Seeing And Hearing History
Western Americana Pioneer Life American Buildings The Materials of History Two Rivers Economic History
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Western Americana
An exciting epoch in American history comes to view in the full-color 35mm filmstrip, The Opening of the West . Produced by Life Filmstrips (9 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y. 20), the 58 frames use pictorial materials reproduced on the pages of Time and Life from museums and private collections. These paintings, sketches, and prints of artist-reporters record events in the movement across half...
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Pioneer Life
The series of nine filmstrips on The American Pioneer , produced by Eye Gate House, Inc. (2716-41st Avenue, Long Island City 1, N. Y.) is a masterful account. Drawing on the wealth of materials displayed at the Farmers’ Museum and its Village Crossroads and the collections of the Fenimore House Museum of the New York State Historical Association at Cooperstown, the survey brings to life rural...
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American Buildings
The primary purpose of the filmstrip Greenfield Village: An Adventure in History , produced by the Department of Education of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (Dearborn, Mich.), is to supply background and orientation for visits to the Village. The filmstrip fills this need admirably. It brings together the somewhat scattered restorations into a logical and meaningful account of...
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The Materials Of History
Two recent motion pictures breathe life into the usually static materials of history. History in Your Community , a classroom teaching film from Coronet (Coronet Building, Chicago 1), examines the evidences of the past that exist in every community. The film demonstrates methods by which intermediate and junior high students can explore changes and developments in their own area. Well...
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Two Rivers
Visual reports of two of our rivers reveal contrasts in their historical connections as well as their geographic surroundings. The story of The Connecticut River is provided in a Life filmstrip. Here is a treatment, in black and white still pictures, of a river that has long been a part of our economy and history. Color views of summer fields or winter snow might enhance the appeal of this...
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